Not Just Another Chicken Dinner

Georgia claims the crown for the state with the most non-profits in the country, so there will no doubt be hundreds of fundraising galas during the last quarter of this year.

There is another crown that I want Georgia, specifically Atlanta to claim: the City that graduates black male students at the highest rate in the country. So far with L.E.A.D., we’re on the right track. To date, every young man that completes our program graduates from high school and enrolls into college and 92% of them receive scholarship money to help pay for college.

Now before you applaud those stats, let us all understand that in order to sustain those stats and to bring more young men into the fold, we must have sustainable support. This year, I need you to put L.E.A.D.’s 5th Annual Dinner With Champions on your calendar, so you can meet the young men we call Ambassadors; young men who were on track to be liabilities to this City, but who are now on track to be the assets they always had the promise to be.

Legendary Football Coach Vince Dooley along with the L.E.A.D. Ambassadors, Kelli Stewart and CJ Stewart at the Dinner With Champions

For those of you who like numbers, the problem is really simple. Right now, youth in zip codes 30310, 30315 and 30318 grow up to represent 80% of Georgia’s prison population. When it comes to juvenile expenditures for youth housed in Georgia’s detention centers, it costs the State about $100K per child each year.

On the contrary, it costs L.E.A.D. about $21,000 per student over six years to develop young men into Ambassadors; that’s about $3,500 per student each year. It comes down to paying now for proven prevention or paying later for incarceration and rehabilitation.

I hope you will join me this year to celebrate as we announce our 7th Ambassador Class. My hope is that you will also join others in supporting L.E.A.D. so we can sustain our work thus far and make L.E.A.D. available to more young men in Atlanta. The tickets are only $150; a small price to pay to save a life. Click here to purchase your tickets.

L.E.A.D. is a proud partner of Atlanta Public Schools serving student-athletes from the 6th-12th grades.